Pulley Press Releases The River on Our Hands by AJ Wright

Today, August 25, 2026, marks the release of The River on Our Hands by AJ Wright. 

The River on Our Hands is a lyric-documentary poetry collection exploring the afterlives of industrial disaster, environmental memory, and inherited silence in West Virginia’s Mid-Ohio Valley. Moving between lyric reflection and documentary fragments, the book traces the impact of tragedy — particularly the 1978 Willow Island cooling tower collapse — alongside more diffuse forms of environmental and generational harm. Rather than offering a straightforward disaster narrative, The River on Our Hands examines how catastrophe seeps into daily life: in speech, in silence, and in the landscape itself.

David B. Prather, author of Bending Light with Bare Hands and 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize winner, says of the collection, “this is not the old story of coal. This is a splinter-identity on the fringe, the Ohio River being the only thing that holds it all together, and that with its own tragedy. Truth is often spoken by the quietest voice in the room – The River on our Hands is, to me, that quiet voice.”

Justin Carter, author of Brazos and Laterals, writes, “AJ Wright’s The River on Our Hands takes readers on a journey into a past so specific that it feels like we’ve delved into our own self. This is America. This is West Virginia. This is life in a small town that exists in the shadow of the plant, industrialization, and tragedy, captured with raw attention to the beauty of our everyday lives.”

When asked about the release of her debut collection, AJ had this to say: “This book is the culmination of years spent trying to understand the place that raised me. I grew up in the Mid-Ohio Valley, and my life has been shaped by the landscapes, industries, and stories that appear throughout these poems. I haven’t always known how to write about that particular inheritance without reducing it to nostalgia or catastrophe, and working on this collection really gave me the opportunity to live in the complexity of all of it instead. I did my best to resist easy narratives. I’m asking readers to see Appalachia as neither idyllic nor hopeless, but as a hugely contradictory place where grief, industry, and resilience coexist.

“I hope folks spend time with these poems the way I spent time writing them—with curiosity, patience, and a willingness to look closely. If the collection encourages someone to think differently about the landscapes they inhabit and the histories they carry, I'll feel like it has done its job.” 

Links to purchase The River on Our Hands online can be found here, or find it at your favorite local bookstore.

About the Poet:

AJ Wright is a poet born in the Ohio River Valley region of West Virginia. She spent her early childhood in a house that stood in the shadow of the Pleasants Power Station at Willow Island. Her work explores the intersections of landscape, labor, and memory in Appalachian communities shaped by industry and environmental change. She is the founding editor of Pictura Journal, and her poems have appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, Antiphony Journal, wildscape. literary journal, River and South Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and was awarded an Oak Ledge Residency at Hindman Settlement School in 2025. She currently lives five miles downriver from her hometown. The River on Our Hands is her first book.